ENWorld’s Hot Roleplaying Games – October 2015

I’m a little late this month but it’s still worth taking a look at ENWorld’s list of hot RPGs because some interesting things are going on in the chart at the moment.

Usual reminder applies: RPGs are scored on the chart based on what’s being actively discussed on as wide a pool of internet fora and blogs as ENWorld can find RSS feeds for. It isn’t tracking sales, and it isn’t even tracking popularity (because conceivably a game could get onto the chart if there were a sufficiently virulent negative reaction to it). What I present here are the scores assigned to each game, not the percentages (which can tend to obscure whether there’s been a recent explosion of RPG discussion – for example, as associated with the D&D 5E release – or whether things are comparatively quiet on the RPG talkosphere).

Incidentally, the ENWorld site claims that they’re tracking posts on the Wizards and Paizo forums and giving separate scores for them, but this is utter bullshit – they did that briefly as an experiment and then stopped. All the figures on the chart do not include official publisher forums – and I think some of the changes this time around may have something to do with that, as you’ll see.

The big news this time is D&D further solidifying its place as the dominant force in tabletop RPGs; over half of all discussions tracked involved 5E, and all other official editions of D&D got a healthy boost in their scores and ranks too (though of course a lot of 5E discussions will also mention other editions as people compare it to them). There’s several factors that might be driving this; for one thing, the release of the Out of the Abyss adventure and the hype for the upcoming Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide have probably stimulated discussion. On top of that, Wizards of the Coast announced over the past month or so that they were going to shut down their community forums. It seems likely to me that this has prompted an exodus of discussion from the Wizards website to other platforms for discussion – and since the official Wizards discussion fora weren’t included in the game-specific statistics before, that represents a lot of D&D-focused discussions that would previously have not been tracked coming onto the radar all of a sudden.

Additionally, 5E accounts for nearly three quarters of the discussion of D&D-related games, so it seems to have largely succeeded at becoming the One Edition to Rule Them All – although discussion is not the same time as actual play or endorsement, this level of discussion suggests that 5E is the edition which everyone who cares about D&D has an opinion about, and once an edition dominates the discussion to this extent that’s an extremely powerful position for it to be in.

In other news, despite losing a bunch of points this time World of Darkness remains the most discussed non-D&Dalike RPG by a healthy margin, with over 57 points between it and closest competitor Exalted, whose score and rank shot up this time – possibly due to the 3rd Edition Kickstarter finally being on the verge of delivering.

Feng Shui has also seen a substantial boost in its fortunes, with the new edition evidently building up a head of steam. Mutant Chronicles has also had a big boost, presumably due to the announcement of an upcoming new edition, and all the different Star Wars games seem to have had a little boost of late, possibly because of the anticipation of the new movie. That said, we’re still looking at a market which is to a large extent dominated by variations on D&D, the World of Darkness, and Exalted. It’s like the mid-2000s all over again without the masses of shitty OGL-bandwagoning shovelware clogging up the market.